Why I’m Participating in a Relay Event

I’m never going to be a doctor, or a scientist, but I do have the gift of being able to draw monsters, robots and dinosaurs pretty well. So, while that’s not going to directly find anyone a cure for cancer, it’s my one marketable skill, and it’s what I have to give. (I’m kinda like the little drummer boy, but instead I draw goofy stuff).

THE CHOICES:
For a small, quick, digital sketch donate $5 to my team and I will e-mail you whatever you ask me to draw. (Please try to be reasonable though, don’t put like “Army of 1,000 flaming monkeys”. I mean you can, but it probably won’t look so hot in a quick sketch.)

For a Medium Sized, slightly more detailed digital sketch donate $10 to my team.

For a really large, print quality image, in color donate at least $15.

Click the Picture Link above, or go to http://main.acsevents.org/goto/mudpuppy to donate.

I’m also going to be there the night of the relay doing real life pen and paper sketches, which I usually charge quite a bit more for, but will be keeping the same pricing structure as above! So if you want some original artwork, on the cheap, and for a good cause, you should come to the Solvay relay event June 7th.

It’s funny, I think my all time favorite next gen game to date has been UNCHARTED 2. And I remember thinking on my first playthrough of that game, that this was the game Tomb Raider should’ve been in the modern era. Well, apparently the developers of this incarnation of Lara Croft felt the same way.
To say it borrows a bit from the UNCHARTED series would be obvious. But let’s be fair, UNCHARTED borrowed a lot of gameplay ideas from the original Tomb Raider, so I think it’s more a case of there being only so many ways to make a good modern adventure game. (Still, even the game’s font is nearly the same).
The story itself is actually more of a prequel of sorts, with a young Lara becoming stranded on a mysterious island and being forced to survive all manner of brutalities. The first shot of the opening cinematic reveals Lara to be young, attractive, but overall way more realistic than her former sexpot antecedent. She’s a real person you might actually meet. I wonder if maybe, female gamers have finally become a demographic developers are taking notice in, and therefore are not basing their character designs on cartoon caricatures of what adolescent boys think women look like. Or maybe it’s just that the technology has caught up with the series, and it would just look incredibly goofy to have sexy Lara from 1996 in a 2013 game. In any case, they’ve made Lara pretty believable, in every sense of the phrase.
And I gotta say, it works. You’re almost immediately engaged in the story. Subjecting your main character to that much physical hardship does a pretty good job of getting the player to emotionally invest in the character. The only problem with this is that as the game progresses, Lara gets subjected to so much violence and abuse it becomes a little hard to swallow. No human being could actually survive some of the shit she pluckily manages to live through, but this is a minor complaint really. I mean, it’s a video game. You shouldn’t go into it expecting realism.
One of the things that has bugged me for awhile now has been the overall obsession with multiplayer and open world gaming. It seems like in the post-World of Warcraft era, every game, no matter what, must have a massive open world with sandboxy non-linear play and the ability to multiplay or tweet about it or something. And it’s honestly kinda bullshit, and we all know it. I did not pick up Tomb Raider to play it with 13 year olds. I picked it up hoping for a good singleplayer experience, and fortunately it delivers this. It manages to have an open map, which I was initially a little leery of, but you can eventually fast travel around (a la Fall Out), and there’s lots of hunting for random bonus objects to unlock stuff, which I admit ups the replay value. I’m just sayin’, linear, singleplayer gameplay has its merits, particularly when you’re trying to tell a story. Narratives tend to be linear. I like the fact that multiplayer isn’t a huge aspect of Tomb Raider, although of course, it’s an option. I may be alone on this. Also, get off my lawn.
The gameplay itself is fun, and the controls are good. It still feels like Tomb Raider. It also omits UNCHARTED’s maddening habit of inundating you with colossal numbers of bad guys just for the hell of it. The fighting is more measured and maybe a little predictable, but the emphasis is more on the exploring and collecting, which is also maybe a little more faithful to Tomb raider’s roots.
Tomb Raider is a good game that gets a lot of things very right. We need more games like Tomb Raider, with believable characters, good writing, and fun gameplay. I’ve always had a soft spot for adventure games, and I eagerly await the inevitable sequel. But maybe next time, go a tiny bit easier on poor Lara, OK guys?